Identificações

TWEETS RECENTES

ENCONTRE-NOS NO FACEBOOK

Professors share classroom successes at Innovate

Hi Everyone, I'm Dan Griffin, the Marketing Manager for JazzHub and an enthusiastic supporter of how software development is taught in the classroom.

With regard to academic activities, I'm happy to say that this year's Innovate was the best yet. We invited professors from the United States, Brazil, and Mexico to share what they are doing in their classrooms, learn from other professors, and give feedback on how we (IBM) can make our Academic Initiative program even stronger.

However, our fun didn't stop with the professors! We also hosted the first ever "Innovate Race Car Challenge" that pitted students (Generation Next) vs. customers (Generation Now) in a Java programming competition. None of the team members were experienced in Rational Team Concert or the Agile Process, so it was a perfect opportunity to learn by doing. These teams established projects in RTC and submitted code to the shared stream. Over the course of three agile sprints, the contestants improved their race cars' logic and a final race determined the winning team. Congrats to our team made of students from Harvard and Florida Technical College for taking the gold! Go Gen Next!

Our final academic activity at Innovate was hosting students and teachers from Lake Brantley High School (Altamonte Springs, FL) and naming them the North American Mainframe High School of the year. This is a great group of kids, who absolutely blew away the competition (at a university level!) in this annual IBM Master the Mainframe contest. You can learn more about that contest and stay tuned for details on how to register for the 2012 Master the Mainframe competition.

Here's a short video I made with the students from Lake Brantley:

If you'd like more information on how to get your school involved with IBM, check our IBM Academic Initiative, leave a comment here or send me an email: jdgriffi at us.ibm.com

About the author

Dan Griffin is a Marketing Manager in the IBM Rational brand specifically focused on growing the Jazz.net community. Dan is a career IBMer with both a technical and marketing background. After 7 years as a software engineer, Dan changed gears and moved into the marketing organization in 2005. He enjoys marketing cutting edge products and has worked on several new offerings such as WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, WebSphere Smash, and now Jazz.net. Dan lives in Morrisville, NC (a suburb of Raleigh) with his wife and daughter.